Queer Phenomenology

Phenomenology is an often-used form of inquiry within education and the social sciences more broadly. As scholars have employed its methods to answer complex social and political questions, new modes of inquiry have emerged. One such mode is queer phenomenology, which has sought to engage queer theory with phenomenology for an enriched form of inquiry. In this chapter, queer phenomenology will be explored, including its origins in the 21st century and the kinds of questions it can answer. A discussion of queer phenomenology's relation to the field of critical phenomenology is also included. Current research in both the social sciences and education that use this method is covered in depth.

The Crisis Management Experiences of Female Media Leaders During The Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic entered Indonesia in February 2020, one month later most of the institutions changed their work policies. Business processes have also changed. Leaders at all levels are tested to be adaptive to unpredictable conditions, including the media business which is also affected by the effects of the pandemic. The leaders of female countries have shown good performance, as evidenced by the number of countries they lead that have succeeded in reducing the number of Covid-19 transmissions. Women leaders are considered to be more responsive and quick. Even so, how the experiences of women leaders at other leadership levels have not been well covered in any media. So this study will try to understand the experiences of female media leaders during the pandemic in 2020 as well as the initial steps for crisis management. This study uses a critical paradigm with a descriptive approach. The theory used is Standpoint Theory developed by Sandra Harding and Julia T. Wood and Crisis Management. This theory seeks to understand the world through women's eyes. The method used is critical phenomenology. The results showed that women as media leaders act quickly, utilize technology, and adapt business processes. Apart from that, it puts forward four crisis management steps in its implementation.

PENGELOLAAN KESEHATAN DAN KESELAMATAN KERJA PADA MASA PANDEMI COVID-19: FAKTA DAN TANTANGAN

ABSTRAKPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan implementasi pengelolaan kesehatan dan keselamatan kerja pada masa pandemi Covid-19 pada Kantor Pos Cabang Rembang beserta faktor yang mempengaruhinya. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode analisis data kualitatif dengan pendekatan fenomenologi kritis dengan teknik pengumpulan data melalui observasi, wawancara, penelusuran dokumen, dan dokumentasi. Informan yang dilibatkan sebagai sumber data terdiri dari informan subjek dan informan triangulasi. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa pengelolaan kesehatan dan keselamatan kerja pada masa pandemi Covid-19 di Kantor Pos Cabang Rembang sudah mengimplementasikan prinsip protokol kesehatan 5M. Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi implementasi pelaksanaan protokol kesehatan 5M pada Kantor Pos Cabang Rembang, meliputi sosialisasi, disiplin, kesadaran, pengawasan, tingkat pendidikan, tingkat kesejahteraan, dan adat kebiasaan. Implikasi hasil penelitian ini adalah meskipun protokol kesehatan 5M tidak mudah untuk dilaksanakan di lingkungan Kantor Pos Cabang Rembang, tetapi dengan adanya sosialisasi masif, kesadaran demi kepentingan bersama, dan kedisiplinan maka implementasi protokol kesehatan 5M dapat dilaksanakan dengan baik. ABSTRACTThis study aims to describe the implementation of occupational health and safety management during the Covid-19 pandemic at the Rembang branch post office and the factors that influence it. This study uses a qualitative data analysis method with a critical phenomenology approach with data collection techniques through observation, interviews, document searches, and documentation. The informants involved data sources consisted of subject informants and triangulated informants. The results of this study indicate that the management of occupational health and safety during the Covid-19 pandemic at the Rembang Post Office has implemented the principles of the 5M health protocol. The factors that influence the implementation the 5M health protocol at the Rembang branch post office include socialization, discipline, awareness, supervision, education level, welfare level, and customs. The implication of the results this study is although the 5M health protocol is not easy to implement in the Rembang branch post office, but with massive socialization, awareness for the common interest, and discipline, the implementation of the 5M health protocol can be carried out properly.

Edith Stein's Contribution to Critical Phenomenology: On Self-Formation and Value-Modification

One defining claim that critical phenomenologists make of the critical phenomenological method is that description no longer simply plays the role of detailing the world around the describing phenomenologist, but rather has the potential to transform worlds and persons. The transformative potential of the critical phenomenological enterprise is motivated by aspirations of social and political transformation. Critical phenomenology accordingly takes, as its starting point, descriptions of the oppressive historical social structures and contexts that have shaped our experience and shows how these produce inequitable ways of being in the world (Guenther 2020, 12). For example, critical phenomenologists have provided rich descriptions of marginalized lived experience, particularly racialized experience (Ngo, 2017; Yancy, 2017), dis-abled experience and experiences of illness (Lajoie and Douglas, 2020; Toombs, 1993), gendered experience (Beauvoir, 2009; Salamon, 2010), and so forth. What is common across these accounts is the assumption that these descriptions provide means of enacting political change. First, they illuminate the existence of oppressive structures and their effects upon us, our possibilities, and our relations. Second, through increasing awareness they begin to denaturalize the oppressive historical structures that “privilege, naturalize, and normalize certain experiences of the world while marginalizing, pathologizing, and discrediting others” (Guenther 2020, 15). Third, through strategic responses (e.g., hesitation in Alia Al-Saji’s work), they produce new possibilities of action and experience, which initiates the process of creating different ways of being in the world (Al-Saji 2014).2

Introduction to the Special Issue

The Collegium Phaenomenologicum has met in Umbria, Italy every summer since 1976; only COVID made it pause, and hopefully only temporarily. It has been a forum for deep and broad discussion of the phenomenological tradition; it has also been a place where that tradition has itself been broadened and deepened by generations of thinkers who came to study the classical texts and to do phenomenology. In 2019, over the course of three weeks in July, in three lecture courses, several talks by visiting faculty, twelve text seminars sessions, art workshops, and very many informal talks over dinner, on the terrace, and on long walks through the town of Città di Castello and beyond, the Collegium worked on the question of critical phenomenology.

What is Phenomenological about Critical Phenomenology? Guenther, Al-Saji, and the Husserlian Account of Attitudes

Since Gayle Salamon’s 2018 article “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?”, phenomenologists and critical theorists have offered various responses to the question this title poses. In doing this, they articulated the following considerations: is renewed criticality targeting the phenomenological method itself, does it expand its subject matter to marginalized experiences, does it retool key phenomenological concepts? One aspect of this debate that has been left under-interrogated, however, is the word “phenomenology” itself. There is after all another question to ask in this context: what is phenomenological about critical phenomenology? Many avenues of response are of course possible. Phenomenology could most broadly be meant as an approach that concerns itself with what is given in experience in order to describe the structures of that givenness. From a Husserlian perspective, pure phenomenology is the science which concerns itself with phenomena in the full and diverse sense of the word—not as understood by specific natural or human sciences. What is distinctive of phenomenology is thus not what subset or type of phenomena it is interested in but how it relates to them, which, as Husserl introduces Ideas I, happens “in a completely different attitude.”

A Critical Phenomenology of Walking: Footpaths and Flightways

It is hardly difficult to imagine writing about critical phenomenology and walking. One might pause over the method of critical phenomenology as a meta-odos, a thinking of the path. Or consider the steps critical phenomenology takes and the unique pitch of its gait as it traverses the borderlands between phenomenology and critical theory. One might query how these two have the capacity to walk so well side by side, so much so that they can become as one, barely distinguishable against an open sky. Such an inquiry would no doubt track how it is that phenomenology walks toward things, through things, into things, suspending the eye of the natural attitude and proceeding ever so carefully and yet bluntly in search of what springs toward it. But such an inquiry would also track how that very process is a scripted processual, notwithstanding all the suspensions upon which it steps. Who and what writes and rewrites the script of what appears, when, and how? What inscriptions define appearances in advance and diaeretically cut them clean from one another? And what are the unscripted forces still at work? Ferreting out the work of scripts and inscriptions, such an inquiry would pause over the hidden structures that constrict what might feel like a free flight of the mind, a bit of unfettered rambling in the fields of consciousness. Thinking critical phenomenology as walking, then, means tracking the two moving in tandem. Phenomenology pulls toward the horizon of experience, while critical theory veers toward structural analyses. Together, they tread a uniquely illuminating path.

Prolegomena to Any Future Historicizing: The Dilthey-Husserl Debate and Why It Matters for Critical Phenomenology

For more than a century, phenomenology’s relation to history has remained a problem for phenomenological analysis. This can in part be attributed to the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of phenomenology. As Europe moved increasingly toward world war at the turn of the 20th century, a growing consciousness of the historical relativity of all values and knowledge spread throughout the continent, leading Ernst Troeltsch to speak of the “crisis of historicism” (Rand 1964, 504-5). In this same context, Edmund Husserl framed phenomenological analysis in opposition to history. While Husserl recognized the “tremendous value” that history has to offer philosophical thinking, he believed that a purely historical reduction of consciousness necessarily results in the relativity of historical understanding itself, like a serpent that bites its own tail (Husserl 2002, 280). If phenomenology was to be a genuine science, it had to attempt a phenomenological reduction which would seize upon the essence of our historical being, i.e., our essence as beings that exist within history and are inseparable from it. What was required over and beyond a historical understanding of lived experience was an analysis of the structure of historicity itself (293-4).

On the Sources of Critique in Heidegger and Derrida

According to Lisa Guenther’s concise account, critical phenomenology seeks to expose not only the transcendental conditions of seeing and making the world (such as subjectivity, embodiment, and temporality), but the “quasi-transcendental” ones we find in contingent historical and social structures, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity (2020, 12). This excellent formulation raises the question of its central distinction: from what position would the critical phenomenologist be able to distinguish transcendental from quasi-transcendental conditions, or universal from contingent structures? This question recalls post-Heideggerian treatments of transcendental historicity (Crowell & Malpas 2007) and the possibilities of critical theorizing, e.g., the Habermas-Gadamer debate on lifeworld and critique (How 1995). These issues also remind us of earlier attempts to forge alliances between (post-)phenomenology and critical theory by scholars shuttling between Freiburg (or Paris) and Frankfurt. At times, these went under the label “critical ontology” and often sought to develop a coherent vision out of Western Marxism and phenomenology, with a special focus, it seems, on Adorno and Heidegger (Dallmayr 1991; Guzzoni 1990; Mörchen 1981; Macdonald & Ziarek 2008).